Unified Communications

Nortel's carcass continues to be picked at, with many golden nuggets discovered, making their demise all the more surprising.
Google is offering $900 million for 6,000 Nortel telecom patents covering 4G, wireless, data networking, optical, voice, semiconductors and other telecom areas, according to ZDNet.

The tech world has recently seen an explosion in patent litigation, often involving low-quality software patents, which threatens to stifle innovation. Some of these lawsuits have been filed by people or companies that have never actually created anything; others are motivated by a desire to block competing products or profit from the success of a rival’s new technology. The patent system should reward those who create the most useful innovations for society, not those who stake bogus claims or file dubious lawsuits. It's for these reasons that Google has long argued in favor of real patent reform, which we believe will benefit users and the U.S.

According to the report, “The VoIP service market weathered the economic turmoil of the last couple of years, and, with increasing customer adoption, reached $49.8 billion in 2010 (compared to $34.8 billion in 2008). While the residential services segment remains the largest of the market at 69% of total revenue, business VoIP services are growing at faster rates; a notable example: SIP trunking had a breakout year with 143% revenue growth in 2010,” notes Diane Myers, directing analyst for VoIP and IMS at Infonetics Research.

VoIP SERVICES MARKET HIGHLIGHTS

Infonetics Research forecasts the combined business and residential/SOHO VoIP services market to grow to $74.5 billion in 2015

Managed IP PBX business VoIP service revenue is expected to more than double from 2010 to 2015

NTT of Japan retains its leadership as the world's largest residential VoIP service provider, followed by Comcast and France Télécom

The fastest growing segments of the VoIP services market are SIP trunking and hosted UC telephony

The number of residential VoIP subscribers increased 19% in 2010 to 157 million worldwide

Based on healthy demand for cloud-based services, the number of seats for IP Centrex and hosted UC services grew 20% in 2010

Aastra today announced the winners of their "XML 4 SIP" contest. Full disclosure, I was one of the judges asked to evaluate and vote for my favorite XML applications that run on their XML-capable Aastra IP phones. According to Aastra, people coming from 16 countries registered for this contest (77 registrations). You can view the various applicants including screenshots here.

Steve Sokol, Asterisk Marketing Director for Digium informed me that starting this week Digium will be presenting a bi-weekly series of webinars called Asterisk Tech Tips. Steve explained, "Each episode consists of a tutorial covering an interesting feature of Asterisk, followed by an open Q&A session. People are welcome to ask questions about the tutorial topic, but it's also an open forum for general Asterisk questions."

This week Malcolm Davenport (Digium employee #4 & Senior Product Manager for Asterisk and Asterisk SCF) will be covering one of the more popular new features of Asterisk 1.8: tying Asterisk into Google. The tutorial will teach people how to effectively use Google's voice chat (part of Gmail) as a soft-phone with Asterisk, and how to make and receive free calls in the U.S.

Back in January 2010 I mentioned how XConnect's peering federation announced at ITEXPO was now offering "High-Definition (HD) Voice Peering Federation". Their federation service for carrier peering let's you carry both HD voice and HD video by passing codecs across carrier networks. I explained one of the stumbling blocks to HD voice when I wrote:

Once you make an outside call then your carrier has to support HD. Further, if your carrier has to hand the call off to another carrier to terminate the call, you need both carriers to have a peering agreement to allow the HD codec to traverse their network.

Recently, I installed the FREETALK Connect Skype-enabled IP-PBX for my sister Kellie Steeve's salon and hair academy businesses (Body Shoppe & Oxford Hair Academy) located at the renowned and purportedly haunted Carousel Gardens. Carousel Gardens was a mansion that was originally built in the late 1800's by William Wooster and later was converted into a restaurant in the mid 60's. Ruth Wooster was the last surviving Wooster to live in the mansion and is said to haunt the location still to this day. Many harmless paranormal activities are said to happen within this mansion that my sister purchased and renamed.

ADSL is very popular, especially in SMEs/SMBs. It's more difficult to get on the VoIP bandwagon with ADSL bandwidth since it typically has only 256Kbits/s upstream bandwidth. Powernet, the UK's oldest business broadband provider claims the average VoIP call uses 42Kbit/s. In my experience with Vonage, I saw more like 90Kbit/s, but I believe I was using Vonage's "HQ" codec (G.711) for the best sound quality where as Powernet is using G.729a (8Kbit/s plus overhead).

In any event, at 42Kbit/s that gives you 6 VoIP calls with barely any no room left for data/Internet. So you'd have to knock that down to maybe 5 simultaneous VoIP calls.

You can indeed make Skype video calls on Apple's iPad 2. I made a test call from my Windows 7 PC to Larry's iPad 2 that he picked up this past weekend. There is no native Skype app optimized for the iPad just yet, but it does work. No word from Skype on when an iPad-optimized version of Skype is forthcoming.

Yesterday, I wrote about a utility that lets you find the versions for all your OCS/Lync clients in the enterprise. Today, I'm going to show you how you can easily add contacts en masse to your Lync clients. This is a great utility for IT administrators looking to deploy Lync without having to go to each workstation to add contacts. It's worth noting that the Office Communications Server 2007 Resource Kit Tools has a utility called LCSAddContacts, but alas this version doesn't work on Microsoft Lync.